Varanasi is a tightly woven tapestry of the ancient and the sacred. The streets reflect this. They are haphazard and cracked, zigzagging between buildings, and littered with trash, standing water, and feces. As the oldest continually occupied city in the world, it’s an urban lasagna: layer on layer on layer of city. 

Our first morning in Varanasi, we set out early to try and beat the heat. At 8 AM, it’s already 100ºF. But even that won’t stop me from having a piping hot chai over breakfast. I forgo my typical coffee to try this quintessential taste of India and, after those first few sips, I vow never to go back. Not while I’m here, at least. 

It’s completely different from the chai I’ve experienced in the States: it’s deeply creamy (Anant tells me this is because they make it with water buffalo milk), with punchy spices that tingle all the way up my nose and down my throat. It tastes like a bonfire. It tastes like courage.

My tongue burns after each sip, and I genuinely can’t tell if it’s because of the spices or the temperature of the silky amber liquid.

After breakfast, we pile into auto rickshas and zip into the street. Traffic here would be terrible anyway, with hundreds of pedestrians playing Frogger, incessant horn-blowing, and nonexistent lanes. But add lumbering, one-ton cows to the mix, and it feels like absolute chaos.

It doesn’t even phase our auto ricksha driver. He takes us as far into the city as he can. But, because portions of the city were built before motorized vehicles existed, some streets are off-limits to engines.

We hop into a bike ricksha, and an older man (who probably weighs 150 pounds) peddles both Tim and me through traffic like it’s nothing. He, too, can only take us so far because, like motorized vehicles, bicycles are not allowed in the city’s oldest parts. From here, we must walk 

Our group winds single-file through alleyways older than my home country. Colorful tarps and fabric stretched overhead between walls afford us some shade and dye the sunlight in blues and oranges. Bollywood music, blaring from an unseen source, clips and garbles. It bounces off walls covered in decades of graffiti and painted advertisements.

Anant leads us to a large opening in an alley wall where a barefoot man sits cross-legged, with a large silver mixing bowl in his lap. Around his perch are bunches of bananas, mangos, and jars of dried fruits and spices. Behind him is a small, high-ceilinged room filled with mismatched chairs. A fan whirs overhead.

“Who would care for lassi?” asks Anant. 

Lassi is a dairy-based dessert beverage, not unlike yogurt, that can be flavored and topped with whatever goodies you like. I decline. Something about diary-based street food makes me nervous, mostly because I don’t see any refrigeration machinery anywhere. I like my lassi super cold. And super safe. We still have days of travel ahead of us and a tight schedule. I’m not going to risk getting sick. Most people in our group place orders though, including Tim, who orders a sweet saffron lassi, and we sit down inside the little room.

As our eyes adjust to the dark interior, we notice there are little square passport photos covering the high walls. Hundreds of faces look back at us. Some are old and faded, the corners curling away from the wall. Some aren’t even photos, but hand-drawn self-portraits on scraps of paper added by those who wanted to participate but were unprepared.

By some strange coincidence, Tim happens to have a copy of both our passport photos in his pocket. We add our faces to the mosaic of memories inside the shop just as his lassi is served to him in a little red clay pot. When he finishes, the barefooted man mimes instructions on where to put the empty pot.

“You can throw it into the gutter,” translates Anant. “It’s cheaper and safer for them to use these clay pots instead of plastic cups.” Looking at the street’s sides, we notice that there are hundreds of red shards from previous patrons. Like a kid who’s just been taught to spit, Tim gleefully obeys, and the pot shatters.

We resume our trek through old Varanasi. Suddenly, we turn a corner, and there she is, glistening in the sun: the River Ganges. And she is stunning. 

A National Geographic feature Tim and I watched prior to our trip told us that hundreds of Hindus trek to her banks every day to bathe in the holy water and wash their sins away. “She is a Hindu goddess,” the voiceover said reverently, “a watery ribbon springing from the hair of Shiva and flowing through heaven, earth, and the netherworld.”

Here, on earth, she is disturbingly polluted. I found a study online that stated the level of fecal coliform bacteria from human waste in the water is more than 100 times the government’s official limit, and this was from a study published ten years before we ever stepped foot in the country. It doesn’t appear to have gotten any cleaner since then. The endangered Ganges Dolphin (unique to this part of the world) is nearly extinct because of this unchecked pollution. 

But as we walk along the riverside ghats (massive stairs along the river’s edge) people are swimming, bathing, doing laundry in the water, and collecting the holy water in plastic containers to anoint their homes and shrines. Honestly, the heat is so intense (with no shade anywhere), I begin to envy those splashing around in the dark water.

The Ganges fluctuates dramatically. Anant tells us that, during the rainy season, she can rise twenty feet or more. The large ghats were made to give people access to the water regardless of its height. After the rainy season, when the water retracts, the ghats are covered in mud and refuse, and they are cleaned every year. 

Anant leads us from one ghat to another. We pass stray goats, shirtless kids, and religious men, their faces smeared white with ash, their bodies wrapped in bright orange cloth. They call out, reaching toward us, attempting to bestow a blessing or prophesy in exchange for cash. 

Anant suddenly turns to huddle us all in close to him. 

“Around this next corner,” he says in a hushed, reverent voice, “is a place where the burning happens. Please do not take pictures, it is a very sacred place. We must be respectful.” The air is heavy with the smell of woodsmoke as he leads on. My stomach knots up. 

I knew this was coming, of course. I knew, when we booked this trip, that our time in Varanasi would include this next experience. Varanasi is, after all, a place where people live side by side with death, and all the rites and rituals that come with it. 

Hindus believe that if your body is surrendered to the Ganges after your death, you go straight to heaven, Anant explains. Some bodies are simply placed into the water. But most are cremated on the banks of the holy river, their ashes pushed into the water to release the deceased into the arms of heaven. We’re about to walk into one of these areas used for cremation.

I’d chosen not to think too hard about seeing all this up close and in-person. I kicked the can down the road until the very last minute (which is now) and even still, my brain feels numb. Like it’s insulating itself from this very intimate encounter with something that’s haunted me, day and night, since my Breaking.  

As we round the corner, we pass a stone bench with a sleeping street dog curled up tightly in its scant noon shadow. Every rib is visible under its patchy skin. I watch it as I walk by, waiting for its eyes to open and take stock of the humans disrupting its nap. 

Then I realize it’s not sleeping. It’s dead. A fitting sentry for the “place where the burning happens.” 

How did it know? Could it smell death on the air and knew this was where it must come when its time was through? 

The “burning place” is a large pit, a couple hundred feet across, built down into the stone ghat. Everything is black with smoke and soot. The walls, the ground, the workers are all covered in it. They tend large funeral pyres fed by logs thicker than my waist. I order my eyes not to look too hard at the flickering cloth mounds at the base of the flames. The fires, Anant would later tell us, never stop burning. 24 hours a day, every single day of the year. These fires never go hungry.

 As our group slowly makes our way around the burning area, the sound of chanting grows. A group of people approaches, ornamented with scarves of strung marigolds and sweeps of white and gold on their faces. On their shoulders, they carry a stretcher. And on that stretcher is another body, white-cloth wrapped and adorned with marigolds and gold jewelry. They pass right by us.

My family is from the deep south of America, from a culture whose mourning rituals feature open caskets, embalmed faces, and hours of visitation. I would learn much later, well into adulthood, that this is not the norm everywhere in America. So the bodies on the stretcher and the pyres were not the first I’d ever seen. 

The first time I saw a body, I was caught somewhere between being a woman and being a child. It’s a weird time to first experience death; to see your parents grieve deeply while trying to wrap your own mind around the ’never-see-them-again’. 

My great-grandfather said he wanted to be buried in a goofy tie…a final wink to his great-grandkids, of whom I was the oldest. The image of his body laying there, looking nothing like himself, wearing that tie with Kermit, Fozzie Bear, and the gang grinning up at me is burned into my brain. I know it was a gesture rooted in love, but I’m still not sure how I feel about it. A person’s first brush with death is unnerving, even without the Muppets in the mix.

It feels surreal to be standing, now, on the periphery of a mourning family performing rituals so different (and yet not) from the ones I know. My thoughts, I’m surprised to notice, are not preoccupied with the idea of death like they have so often been this past year. I’m thinking, instead, of the living. The family. The ones left behind. 

It’s an impossible thing we do: carrying on after the finality of death. 

Turning away from the chanting grievers, we make our way back toward the heart of the city. Walking into the relative cool of a shaded alleyway, I can still smell the woodsmoke that clings to my clothes, my hair, my skin.

//

Our hotel, Hotel Surya Kaiser, is built close to the shore of the river. It’s a gorgeous, multi-story white palace with manicured grounds and an expansive courtyard. Originally built in 1818 for a Nepalese king, it now serves as a banquet hall for weddings and accommodations for tourists like us. 

We convene in the dining room to eat dinner before our evening excursion. Tim and I order a sweet lime soda and it quickly becomes our new favorite iced drink. It’s exactly what it sounds like: lime juice, soda water, and sugar. You can order it with salt instead of sugar, at which point it’s basically a bubbly electrolyte. But sweet is the way to go. 

For dinner, Tim and I elect to try something new, something called Angoori Kofta. Spinach and cheese dumplings stuffed with heat-softened nuts and golden raisins, swimming in a gravy made from tomatoes and blended cashews. Most importantly, it’s served steaming hot and doesn’t flaunt any trepidatious ingredients that might upset my stomach. It is every bit as satisfying as it sounds.

Later, we head back into the oldest part of Varanasi and board a small boat. Every night, on the Ganges’ shores, there is a massive ceremony for the deceased Hindus who were cremated that day. Which is why we’ve come back in the cool of the evening. We’re attending the ceremony. 

Viewing the shore from the middle of the river, we can better see the enormous ghats and riverside palaces built centuries ago by wealthy or royal Hindus in preparation for their deaths. We can also see more, smaller cremation fires blazing onshore for those who could not (or didn’t want to) be cremated on the official pyres we saw earlier.  

Our boat reaches the ceremony site and joins dozens of other boats filled with mourners. The boats pack together so closely that kids selling postcards, hot chai, and cold water can walk across one and step onto the next in the dark. The air smells like smoke and dirty water as the holy men begin performing the rites. 

In the boat just in front of ours, I notice two Indian women staring at me. Sitting side by side, their bodies are turned in toward each other, both faces fixed on me. 

On the first night in Kathmandu, Anant had warned our group that people would stare at us, ask for selfies with us, even thrust their babies into our arms. And he was right. But I’m still not quite used to it. I meet their gaze a few times and quickly look away. They keep staring.

Since the Breaking, I greatly feared intimacy with anyone. Sometimes even eye contact felt like a dangerous level of intimacy to me.  I felt like my trauma story was somehow spelled out in my eyes, and all it would take for someone to discover it was to look at me long enough. Then they’d know. They would see my failure, my humiliation, my inability to recover…

And I couldn’t take any more outside input. I’d opened up a few times to people around me and I feared that, if I dared to let myself be seen, to put down my guard and let my eyes speak, I’d just get the same dismissive, bumper sticker answers that just proved so abrasive to my raw soul. 

So I hid behind my lashes while I spoke to people. I would pick at my nails. I would check my phone. Only when they were speaking, when their attention was on themselves and their own words, would I meet their eyes. It felt like the smallest scrap of control and, in a season where I felt very much out of control, I seized it. 

My eye contact aversion wasn’t only rooted in self-preservation and control. My soul had become a Pandora’s Box of dark thoughts and messy emotions all tumbling over themselves: deep grief melding with jaded doubt and despair, punctuated by frenetic anxiety and panic, and an ever-present undercurrent of molten rage. In the words of Chris McGeown, “There were two reasons I was scared to let people in; the damage they could do, and the damage they could find.”

I also feared that if I opened the floodgates to those closest to me, I might explode all over them, unintentionally making them feel like the target of my anguish. Or worse, I worried I would pull them down with me. I remember Sunday School lessons that likened doubt to a weed, an insidious, contagious species that would choke out the lovelier plants if given the tiniest toe-hold. And I would rather suffer a dozen times over than plant the seed of doubt and despair in the heart of someone I cared about. This is an experience I wish on no one. 

So I locked myself away. And in locking myself away, it became very difficult to be a good wife, friend, sister, human. 

I would learn how to overcome this. It would take years, but I would relearn how to look someone in the eye and own the space I took up. To be rooted in the moment. Eventually even intimately chronicle this story for others. For you. But there was work I had to do first.